As the snow blankets downtown Sudbury’s municipally sanctioned encampment, city staff believe they know what it would take to end homelessness altogether.
Or, at least, bring a “functional-zero” end to homelessness.
This, the city council-endorsed Roadmap to Ending Homelessness from May 2024 notes, is when “homelessness becomes rare, brief and non-recurring,” with three or fewer homeless people at any given point in time in Greater Sudbury.
Last week, Mayor Paul Lefebvre joined the mayors of Ontario’s 29 largest cities (Ontario Big City Mayors) in calling on the province to declare a state of emergency to shore up funding in the midst of a “community safety and humanitarian crisis” around homelessness.
In the midst of this emergency, the City of Greater Sudbury isn’t proceeding with its roadmap.
They don’t have the money in their budget, and the federal and provincial governments haven't stepped up to the degree that city council expects them to.
“Municipalities were not designed to be delivering health care,” Lefebvre said during Tuesday’s city council meeting. “We have stepped up and we will continue to step up.”
There are approximately 275 people who are actively homeless in Greater Sudbury, according to the city’s September count.
Mayor Paul Lefebvre addressed this issue during Tuesday’s meeting, reiterating the oft-repeated declaration that all three levels of government need to step up.
“More transitional and supportive housing is needed, not just today but yesterday,” Lefebvre said. “This is an urgent need, but when all three levels of government come together, real change can happen quickly.”
With various downtown encampments in place for the past few years and the city tabling a clearly outlined $350-million Road to Ending Homelessness last year which governments have left largely unfunded, Sudbury.com reached out to local politicians from all three levels of government to ask why there doesn’t seem to be urgency to tackle the issue on the part of the provincial and federal governments.
We connected with Lefebvre, Sudbury NDP MPP Jamie West, Sudbury Liberal MP Viviane Lapointe and Sudbury East—Manitoulin—Nickel Belt Conservative MP Jim Bélanger to round out the political push, plus city Community Well-Being general manager Tyler Campell for additional context,
We also made several attempts to get comment from the provincial Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, including by both email and phone, but none of these efforts were acknowledged.
With the province declining to return our inquiry, their commitment remains unclear, though West contends that they’ve shirked their responsibility onto the municipality.
The current needs in addressing homelessness
Within the city’s largely $350-million Roadmap to Ending Homelessness, the next big step is getting more transitional housing, Campbell said.
This, alongside supportive and deeply affordable housing, with the city’s current waitlist of almost 2,000 households taking people years to reach the top of the list.
Transitional housing is the next big need because they offer the city’s homeless community the first big step from encampments or emergency shelters toward finding success in permanent housing.
These units target the chronically homeless, of whom approximately 78 per cent are high acuity in Greater Sudbury, Campbell said, explaining, “That’s really why we need supportive housing in a place that has the full wraparound continuum of care for individuals.”
The city has 40 transitional housing units at the recently opened Lorraine Street complex and six units at the 307 Cedar St. shelter.
There are 32 people living at the Lorraine Street complex now, with another five lined up to move in soon and the city anticipating full-capacity by the end of the year.
The city has established a need and associated business cases for two transitional housing complexes, including a 40-unit Indigenous building and a 25-unit youth building. They’ve also set aside land for affordable housing through a municipal land banking effort and publicly sought developers to build them.
“We’re taking an innovative approach at it, and at the same time we’re preparing ourselves so when policy windows open, whether at the provincial or federal levels, we’re prepared,” Campbell said.
As it stands, he said there aren't enough federal and provincial funding windows to even apply under to fully fund the Roadmap to Ending Homelessness, let alone successfully receive.
Although some progress has been made since the roadmap was released last year, including the impending opening of a 38-unit deeply affordable housing complex on Pearl Street and the provincially funded boost in programming at Lorraine Street and 48 scattered supportive housing units, Campbell said the $350-million plan remains largely unfunded.
A municipal political response
The 40-unit Lorraine Street transitional housing complex is a shining example of what Greater Sudbury needs more of, Lefebvre told Sudbury.com following Tuesday’s city council meeting.
During the meeting, Lefebvre highlighted the progress made in tackling homelessness thus far alongside the need for much more to take place to bring it to a functional end by 2030.
He’d planned a trip to Ottawa on Wednesday to follow through on municipal advocacy for federal funding.
With the Lorraine Street project, $7.4-million of its $14.4-million budget was covered by the federal government, with the balance funded by the city.
Earlier this year, the province committed $6.3 million annually for the facility’s operations, plus a downtown HART Hub project, for three years. The funding boosted Lorraine Street programming to 24/7, while the downtown project will consist of 48 scattered supportive housing units which Lefebvre described as “the phase after Lorraine,” with one support staff member assigned per eight residents.
This municipal/provincial/federal partnership needs to happen again, Lefebvre said, pledging to join staff in advocating for funding at every available opportunity.
Municipal funding toward homelessness supports “is not sustainable,” Lefebvre said, citing a $356,000 expenditure in 2015 which has ballooned to $2.2 million this year.
(In Greater Sudbury last year, the city spent $1.15 million on social services and $22.97 million on housing. The province spent $6.65 million on social services and $9.18 million on housing, while the federal government spent $2.44 million on social services and $5.1 million on housing.)
Although the province has yet to declare homelessness an emergency as requested by the Ontario Big City Mayors, Lefebvre said, “We’re already acting like we’re in a state of emergency.”
More transitional and supportive housing is needed, he said.
“We know that more needs to happen, and that’s why we’re asking the province at Queen’s Park to secure funding for operational grants to support this group of individuals who are very vulnerable right now.”
Stressing that “in the last two years, we’ve accomplished a lot,” Campbell said much more is needed to achieve city council’s goal to end homelessness.
He also tampered expectations by noting that the federal government’s recently opened $1.5-billion Canada Rental Protection Fund, included in their latest budget for such things as transitional and supportive housing, will meet “major demands” throughout the nation.
A provincial political response
Although Sudbury.com’s repeated attempts to get answers from the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing were left unacknowledged, we did connect with a provincial cabinet minister last week.
Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade Minister Victor Fedeli was in Sudbury on Dec. 5 to announce $4 million in subsidies toward an $85-million local expansion by mining equipment and engineering company Sandvik.
While there, we asked Fedeli about the province’s sense of urgency in tackling homelessness in Greater Sudbury and the immediate need for more transitional housing units.
Although homelessness falls outside the auspices of Fedeli’s Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade profile, he is also the one of the closest Progressive Conservative MPPs to Sudbury, serving the North Bay-area riding of Nipissing (which isn’t without homelessness).
On the question of “where’s the urgency from the province” in tackling homelessness, Fedeli said, “All of these organizations are making pre-budget consultations, and we look forward to seeing the budget in the new year to see what gets covered.”
Digging into his portfolio, Fedeli said he’s working to support businesses so tax revenue can be spent on such things as health care, addictions and other things which serve the public.
“There doesn’t seem to be an urgency,” West said of the province, adding that the cynical side of him believes it’s all about petty politics, in that the unhoused don’t vote.
“People who are upset about (homelessness) generally blame the municipality, so that probably won’t affect them, and I think that may be part of their decision-making plan,” West said. “The municipality is paying the lion’s share for stuff that’s provincial responsibility.”
On this front, he said the public generally blames mayor and council for homelessness, despite it falling largely outside their jurisdiction, while simultaneously getting mad when property taxes go up, which is at least in part due to the city stepping up where the province has declined.
“We need the provincial money,” West said. “They should be partnering with us, it’s provincial responsibility."
A clear example of this is the city funding a supervised consumption site, he said, which the city paid for on a temporary basis under the assumption the province would step up.
The province never stepped up, so the site, which front-line staff called lifesaving, was shuttered.
The Ford Government has focused on reducing red tape to help spur development, which West considers misdirected effort.
“The Conservative government seems to have this message that if we make it easier for people to build, the price will come down,” he said. “The reality is, if the price goes soft they stop building."
Truly affordable housing needs government subsidies, West said, because the private market isn’t going to fund anything that doesn’t turn a profit.
“If you want to help mental health, keep people in houses. If you want to help with addictions, keep people in housing. If you want kids to get a decent education, make sure they stay in housing,” he said. “It just has to happen.”
A federal political response
Although Greater Sudbury’s Conservative and Liberal MPs predictably don’t see eye to eye, they both told Sudbury.com that ending homelessness should be a priority.
Sudbury East—Manitoulin—Nickel Belt Conservative MP Jim Bélanger doesn’t believe the Liberals have prioritized the issue, while Sudbury Liberal MP Viviane Lapointe contends they have.
“It’s something I think we should all get together and try to find a solution and make progress,” Bélanger said, describing a boost in transitional housing as something “in dire need, that I’m deeply concerned with.”
He has spoken with both Lefebvre and Lapointe about it, and said they all agree that more needs to be done.
People living in tents, he said, isn’t acceptable, and while having everyone in the same place at Energy Court alongside a warming centre is an improvement, putting roofs over their heads would be better, even if it were a temporary fix like tiny homes.
Although Bélanger said he hasn’t made up his mind about supervised consumption sites (Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has repeatedly spoken against them, including in conversation with Sudbury.com during a local visit in October, reiterating that they’re nothing more than “drug dens”), he said he’s “more in favour of treatment and finding places to help people get better.”
Municipalities know best how to tackle homelessness, Lapointe said, adding, “They know what their urgent needs are and they know what solutions are needed and what solutions will work best in their community.”
Lefebvre has visited Ottawa to secure meetings with key ministers, Lapointe said, crediting him as being “effective in presenting Sudbury’s urgent needs.”
“I think the housing crisis that’s before us today is complex, and it requires a multi-pronged approach in its solutions, but it has been very much, I would say, 20 to 30 years in the making,” she said. “There was a decision to stop investing in social housing, and I think that’s where we began to see the trajectory and a lot of the issues we see before us today.”
Echoing Lefebvre’s comments, Lapionte said all three levels of government need to come together, which she clarified hasn't always been the case.
“We had to, in the past, bypass provinces and deal directly with municipalities,” she said.
Pressed further on this perceived disconnect with the Government of Ontario, she later clarified that it’s primarily in the Greater Toronto Area.
“For the most part, when it comes to Sudbury specifically, the goals of the municipality, the provincial government and the federal government have been well aligned,” she said.
“For the community to expect the government to respond, I think, is an appropriate expectation.”
What’s next?
Chronically homeless Greater Sudburians are still moving into the Lorraine Street transitional housing complex, which is anticipated to reach capacity by the end of the year.
Monarch Recovery Services, Shkagamik-Kwe Health Centre and the Canadian Mental Health Association are working to fill the recently announced 48 scattered supportive units the province is funding as part of three years of guaranteed HART Hub grants. Approximately 10 of these units were already filled as of earlier this week.
Once full, there remains plenty of existing need among the approximately 275 people who are actively homeless in Greater Sudbury, of whom 224 are chronically homeless.
The city’s shelters remain at or near capacity and the city’s sanctioned encampment, which includes a 24/7 warming centre with washroom facilities, remains in place at Energy Court in downtown Sudbury.
Ontario Big City Mayors are waiting on word from the province on their call to declare a state of emergency, and city staff have been asked to provide an update to city council members in January on the status of their funding applications to the provincial and federal governments.
“People experiencing homelessness are our neighbours, they are community members who deserve dignity, safety and a path toward stability,” Lefebvre told his colleagues on Tuesday.
It remains to be seen whether this path will be afforded to everyone who needs it, while the city waits for provincial and federal governments to respond to their funding requests.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.